Agile SEO by RankSensehttps://www.ranksense.com
Eliminate SEO guesswork — see great results in 6 weeks, not 6 months!Mon, 21 Jan 2019 18:18:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.9http://hamletbatista.comhttp://hamletbatista.com/wp-content/themes/Hamlet/img/name.jpgHamlet BatistaHamletBatista--InternetEntrepreneurDeveloperAndSearchMarketerhttps://feedburner.google.comSite Mergers and Rebranding Without Losing SEO Traffichttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HamletBatista--InternetEntrepreneurDeveloperAndSearchMarketer/~3/_5MaJO_w93A/
https://www.ranksense.com/site-mergers-and-rebranding-without-losing-seo-traffic/#respondFri, 18 Jan 2019 21:45:28 +0000https://www.ranksense.com/?p=5819Similar to site migrations, site mergers and rebrandings are usually problematic for businesses. Whether it’s a large corporation or a burgeoning startup, changing urls without comprehensive redirects and missing migration steps can result in a dramatic drop-off in site traffic. That being said, the risks associated with traffic loss and the time it takes to...

]]>Similar to site migrations, site mergers and rebrandings are usually problematic for businesses. Whether it’s a large corporation or a burgeoning startup, changing urls without comprehensive redirects and missing migration steps can result in a dramatic drop-off in site traffic. That being said, the risks associated with traffic loss and the time it takes to recover from them can be mitigated with careful planning and testing. In fact, data-driven experimentation is necessary for successful site mergers that minimize SEO impact.

A tale of two migrations

One of our clients had this issue in a two-fold way. Petals, a designer artificial flower and plant vendor, came to us several years ago with the need to move from their old brand URL (www.silkflowers.com) to their new rebranded name. To complicate matters, the company also managed another site–Office Scapes Direct–that we would later need to integrate into the Petals site. There was a lot of overlap and redundancy, and the rebranded move and the then integrated move was certainly risky from an SEO perspective. In the SEO world, there are no protocols for how to merge sites consistently with success, so we knew we had to be strategic and systematic in order to pull it off.

With the first move–the rebranding–their URLs were not changing, other than the domain. In order to minimize the risk of the move, we completed an extensive checklist of changes. The most important component was to add redirects from the old site’s URLs to the corresponding URLs on the new site to transfer the ranking signals. Then, we measured the impact in week intervals. As we expected, there was an initial drop in organic search for the rebranded site, but we quickly saw that level off as Google and other search engines began to prioritize the new domain.

We originally recommended splitting the rebranding and the integration of the sites, so last year, a few years after the successful rebranding to Petals, Chris Corelli, the co-CEO and Managing Director, decided he wanted to proceed with merging Office Scapes Direct. They also wanted to assess the impact on their overall traffic before the official move.

Testing the waters

We took a careful approach to simulate this move and assess the impact on the traffic. Using our software, we added cross-domain canonical tags on high traffic pages of the officescapesdirect.com site. A canonical tag tells search engines the “master” version of a URL, in case there is more than one version. Cross-domain canonicals point to a different domain than the page itself is on. These aren’t common, especially in the world of ecommerce. The Office Scapes Direct ecommerce platform didn’t support cross-domain canonicals, but our software made it easy to add these.

Our cross-domain canonicals signalled to search engines that the Petals.com pages should be recognized as the primary version of the other site. We applied the canonical tags gradually in a few batches, prioritizing the pages with organic traffic so we could see results quickly. As we experimented and looked at the data, we had to ask ourselves two primary questions: 1) Did Google find the canonical tag and drop the original page from the index? And 2) Is the traffic to Petals.com staying at the same level as the two sites combined?

Using data to guide decisions

First, we verified that Google had discovered our canonical tags, a month after we applied them. We then tracked the traffic for pages that displayed the correct canonical URL in a search, and compared to the previous year’s traffic for the two sites combined. At first, we saw a decrease in traffic compared to the previous year of -21%. However, within a month, the net traffic was up 7% over the previous year.

This data helped us make informed decisions about timing and SEO. When the sites recently merged, we initially saw mitigated impact to site traffic and, in the end, we are seeing ongoing improvement.

Strategic experimentation creates innovative SEO protocols

This company’s first move was a branding one, and the second was logistical–accordingly, RankSense had to approach both the migration and integration with nuanced and careful experimentation. Nothing is guaranteed with SEO, but there are ways to anticipate problems with informed strategies. SEO can make or break a business because 30% or more of site traffic could depend on it. At RankSense, we are conscientious but innovative in our approach because we believe data-driven experimentation can ultimately discover new effective SEO strategies.

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/site-mergers-and-rebranding-without-losing-seo-traffic/feed/0https://www.ranksense.com/site-mergers-and-rebranding-without-losing-seo-traffic/When SEO is Not Enough to Grow Your Businesshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HamletBatista--InternetEntrepreneurDeveloperAndSearchMarketer/~3/9Rtk_WWx-vQ/
https://www.ranksense.com/when-seo-is-not-enough-to-grow-your-business/#respondFri, 11 Jan 2019 23:58:28 +0000https://www.ranksense.com/?p=5808At RankSense, businesses come to us with SEO needs because they realize that search engine optimization is one of the best ways to increase visibility for their company and sales of their products. For many of our clients, that is the case and we are happy to help them grow. However, we have other clients...

]]>At RankSense, businesses come to us with SEO needs because they realize that search engine optimization is one of the best ways to increase visibility for their company and sales of their products. For many of our clients, that is the case and we are happy to help them grow. However, we have other clients who may need a more compelling sales strategy in order to make SEO work to their advantage. In other words, some businesses need to take a step back from their current sales approach to discover creative business strategies that dovetail with SEO.

When growth plateaus

We recently had the pleasure of working with one such client, Crystal Imagery. The company is a high-end glassware maker whose clients include U.S. House of Representatives, the CIA, and high-end resorts. Their custom deep-engraved bar and stemware are finer in quality than that of their laser engraved competitors. However, in an online search, it was very hard for potential customers to realize this disparity because the visuals of their product look similar to inferior products on sites such as Amazon. For this very reason, when we first began working with them, one of their biggest challenges was that they could not compete with companies with laser printed logos at a fraction of the cost.

Thinking outside the box and taking risks

Their products could not stand out. We helped them initially in Yahoo store platform, but they felt really constrained, so we helped them transition to Shopify. Nevertheless, their performance issues persisted, and I began to realize they were happening downstream of SEO. RankSense and Crystal Imagery then hit a plateau in performance, and I personally began to feel like we could no longer make a difference for their business. In fact, I suggested that we part ways. When I told Eric Schuchart, the company’s CEO, he insisted that we stay partners given their needs at the time. So instead of focusing on SEO part of their business, I started to focus on their specific business in their specific industry. I did my research and realized that their main problem was not SEO, but that the product could not be distinguished online from lesser, cheaper products, no matter how high in a search they appeared. The only way to truly understand Crystal Imagery’s quality and craftsmanship was to physically see their product. I told Eric, “I think you could use a promotional strategy that offers free samples.” At first, he balked, thinking that he could potentially lose quite a bit of money producing samples for clients that would not place orders. I countered that it would be a good problem to have. In fact, if that were the case, that means that the company is on people’s radar.

The big payoff

I eventually convinced Eric to try this idea with qualifying customers. Crystal Imagery ended up making 30% more from their website in 2018 than they had in the previous year. And with regards to fake orders, they found it relatively easy to distinguish them and also realized that their number would have to be significantly high for this business strategy not to make sense. Why? Because when people receive their sample product, they have a very high closing rate.

Committed to the success of each customer

At RankSense, we believe SEO is a key business strategy that should be maximized and customized for each client. Nevertheless, while SEO is our wheelhouse, we do try to look at the bigger picture and in the broader context for our clients–we go the extra mile because we realize that SEO is part of a winning business strategy, not the only business strategy. If there is anything that we can add beyond our SEO expertise, we will try to be helpful because we are about the success of our customers.

AB Testing Your Organic Search Snippets

Meta descriptions, the little snippets that show up when you Google something…what business really needs ‘em, right?Before you answer, let’s walk a moment in a hypothetical online shopper’s shoes… Summer’s around the corner, and let’s say that 2018 is the year you finally invest in that giant inflatable pool float. You’re envisioning a 6-seat, 14-foot giant unicorn, but you want to shop around a bit – and unfortunately Geoffrey the Giraffe and Toys R Us have gone the way of the dinosaurs. So you’re at your computer, credit card in hand, and you’ve searched Google for “giant pool floats.” Chances are you’re glancing over the meta descriptions before deciding which pages to visit. But chances also are that most of our imaginary pool float retailers, like 63 percent of website owners according to one study, won’t have dedicated any time to write one.Findings in RankSense’s research have continually indicated that small efforts towards crafting the right meta description can mean big payoffs in terms of a page’s click-through rates (CTRs). And pool float salesman or not, unless you can rely completely on name recognition to ensure clicks, carefully written meta descriptions are a built-in chance to attract a customer and make a sale – a free shot at hooking them and reeling them in. So why is it that retailers continue to pass up this opportunity to engage their customers?

Taking your meta description game to the next level

Perhaps I’m preaching to the converted. Maybe you’re hip to the importance of meta descriptions and you’ve read our blog post discussing strategies for crafting compelling, unique, and informative snippets. Maybe you’ve got some different strategies in mind, and you want to test some different descriptions out. What then?In this age of mega ecommerce and big data, simple, straightforward trial and error isn’t going to cut it – to compete in the big leagues, finding what works means running analysis the way the pros do. Fortunately, with a little know-how, stepping up your meta description game doesn’t have to be a time-intensive, costly endeavor. If you’ve got ten minutes, this post is going to cover the nitty-gritty of performing an AB statistical analysis to test how different meta-descriptions can affect traffic to your site’s pages. We’ll be assigning each of your site’s pages to different test and control groups, with each group employing a different snippet strategy you aim to test. By measuring which snippet strategies work best, you’ll gain the insight needed to increase your pages’ click-through rates – you’ll be able to drive more organic traffic to your site, and you’ll increase your organic revenue.

Step 1: Gather traffic data

Before assigning your site’s pages to test and control groups, we need to determine how much traffic each page gets daily. Without ascertaining which pages get the most, we might assign a large number of high-traffic pages to the same test group, rendering the relative success observed for a particular meta description inconclusive. So, to avoid sampling bias, we’re going to gather traffic data for each page using Google Analytics. What we want to know is the number of unique visits to each page on the site, per day. In truth, how you go about doing this is up to you, but we tend to use the Google Analytics google sheets addon. Using the addon is easy – the first time you use it you’ll want to select “create new report” and you’ll be shown a context menu that will help you fill in the relevant parameters.For the sake of our AB tests, we typically use the ga:newUsers metric, and the ga:landingPagePath and the ga:Date dimensions. When grouping by multiple dimensions, use a comma to separate them.The “metric” row will be the actual numerical value you’re looking for – in this case, unique new users visiting the site. The “dimensions” row will be how the results are grouped. In this case, they’re grouped by the date and the page that was visited.Finally, the “segments” row will correspond to the type of google analytics data you’re querying. “ga::-5” corresponds to organic, unpaid search traffic. You can find a handy list of the various segments available here.If you’re familiar with SQL, this set of parameters might look similar to the following SQL statement:SELECT SUM(newUsers), date, page FROM google_analytics GROUP BY date, page WHERE segment = “organic_search”

You’ll notice a number of parameters that weren’t in the create report context menu. The only ones we need to worry about for now are the Start Date and End Date. For the sake of running an AB test, I typically grab anywhere from 6 months’ to a year’s worth of data. But you might choose to go with a shorter period of time if you receive a lot of traffic, or if the amount of traffic on all your pages has recently changed dramatically.Now, after you’ve run the report (by selecting “run reports” instead of “create new report” in the drop down) you’ll notice a new sheet at the bottom. This will contain the data you’re after.

Step 2: Stratified sampling

Now that we have our data, we can begin the process of assigning pages to test and control groups, with each group employing a different snippet strategy. As noted above, we can’t just randomly assign each page to a test or control group. We need the statistical properties of our test and control groups to be as similar to one another as possible. Said another way, we want each group to look as identical as possible – that we can confidently attribute changes in traffic to the group’s particular meta description strategy, and not to sampling bias or random flukes.To accomplish this we’re going to use a technique known as “stratified sampling”. The basic gist is we sort the pages by how much total traffic they received over the time period selected, and we assign them to evenly sized groups known as “ntiles.” For example, the following represents a set of 10 pages sorted by total traffic, and grouped into 5 Ntile groups:

Page

Aggregate Total Traffic

NTILE

Page 1

1

1

Page 2

1

1

Page 3

4

2

Page 4

5

2

Page 5

5

3

Page 6

10

3

Page 7

13

4

Page 8

14

4

Page 9

20

5

Page 10

31

5

Note also that you don’t have to use the total traffic, but could just as easily use the average daily traffic, or the median daily traffic, etc. What you decide to use might be influenced by how long the time period you chose in step 1 was, or your own knowledge of how variable traffic on your pages typically is. You could even try to sort the pages by more than one value – for example, by total traffic and median daily traffic – and create ntiles based on that sorted list. The choice is yours, and will require some experimentation.In any case, once you’ve stratified your ntiles you’re ready to do the sampling.Conceptually this is very simple, we want to take a random sample from each ntile group, numbered 1-5 above. With 5 ntile groups, and 2 pages per group, we can do this a maximum of two times without replacing the pages once they’ve been sampled. In all likelihood you’ll want more than just two sample groups for your AB test, but for the purposes of this example two’s enough. Concretely using the above dummy data we might end up with 1 sample group with pages [1, 4, 5, 8, 9], and another with pages [2, 3, 6, 7, 10]. Now, as an optional (but helpful) step, we want to calculate how similar each of our sample groups are to one another, and use the most similar groups as our control groups. We’ll see why later.

Step 3: Apply your experimental snippet strategies to each test group

The remaining groups become our test groups. To each of these test groups you’ll apply crafted organic snippets reflecting a particular meta description tactic. The test groups will employ your various experimental snippet strategies, while the meta descriptions for the pages in the control groups will remain completely unchanged.

Step 4: Analyze efficacy

Now you’ll have to play the waiting game. You’ll need to allow at least a month or two to pass in order to let the changes to the test groups take effect. Afterwards, you’ll have sufficient data points to analyze the efficacy of your interventions.This next step is the most technical. Here we’ll be creating what’s known as a “bayesian structural time series” model using the control groups. This model predicts a “counterfactual” time series that represents what “would have been” if we hadn’t made any changes. We previously kept the control groups similar to one another so as to improve the accuracy of this counterfactual model.Using this model, we’ll be able to compare one test group’s actual results (i.e., the traffic received by the test pages in that group) against the counterfactual “would have been.” Any positive or negative differences can be reasonably attributed to the intervention applied in the AB test (assuming no other changes were made to the pages).Code-wise, this step is easy. A python package called causal_impact does all of the heavy lifting for us. We only need to feed in the control and test data, and what we get out looks something like this:

What you’ll end up with are three graphs where the X-axis measures time, the Y-axis measures the sum of new users visiting a group’s pages on a given day, and the vertical dotted line marks the date on which the meta description changes were made to your pages. The grey areas in all cases, FYI, represent a 95% confidence bound, meaning we’re 95% confident that the “real” data lies somewhere between those grey areas.In the first chart you can see the red dotted line is the counterfactual, x1 and x2 are the controls that the counterfactual is based on, and the black line is the data from the actual test group.The middle chart shows the difference between the prediction (the counterfactual) and the test data (the black line). The data should be at or fluctuate around zero (the green line) before the vertical dotted line marking the date the changes were made. If your meta description strategies caused positive or negative changes in traffic, to the right of that vertical line you’ll see the red line significantly deviate from the green line. The final chart summarizes this expectation by showing the cumulative change observed between the test data and the counterfactual. Up is good. Down is bad.The moral of the storyWith your results in front of you, you’re likely to see that spending even a little time on creating more engaging meta descriptions paid off. You’re almost certain to see that, lo and behold, people are reading them!The moral of the story is give your snippets the same consideration you would paid ads. Spend some time crafting them, and then follow the simple guide above for AB testing that’ll reveal their impact. If your CTR rates don’t show improvement, formulate a different strategy, and then test again.As always, let us know how it goes in the comments below. And be sure to keep checking out the RankSense blog for more SEO best practices!
Feel free to check out the previous tips in this series:

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/ab-testing-your-organic-search-snippets/feed/0https://www.ranksense.com/ab-testing-your-organic-search-snippets/Why We Guarantee a 15% Revenue Lifthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HamletBatista--InternetEntrepreneurDeveloperAndSearchMarketer/~3/dRqaztwTddg/
https://www.ranksense.com/our-seo-guarantee/#respondFri, 06 Oct 2017 13:30:43 +0000https://www.ranksense.com/?p=5490Guarantees in SEO are practically non-existent, but we're able to guarantee 15% revenue lift to the clients we choose to work with. Find out how.

Why We Guarantee a 15% Revenue Lift

What if you could get a guarantee when you hire an SEO firm? Not a guarantee of impressions or rankings or eyes on your site, but an actual dollar-value guarantee?
RankSense offers a guaranteed lift in revenue of 15% with our SEO software and in collaboration with agency partners. Such a guarantee is virtually non-existent amongst reputable SEO firms.
We believe in offering a guaranteed lift in revenue because it aligns our goals with the goals of our clients.
We are only successful if our clients are – this is how it should be.Here’s the caveat: We are able to offer this guarantee because we are selective about who we work with. We will only sign on a client if we’re confident that they will be successful with us. More on that later.
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Why most SEOs don’t offer a guarantee

It’s no secret:The consensus amongst reputable SEO firms is that you cannot offer guaranteed rankings. Josh Steimle explains in his article “Why the Best SEO Firms Don’t Offer Guaranteed Results” that rankings are inherently unstable, and are in fact, a poor metric for overall performance. (We would agree on those points.) Moz’s Rand Fishkin echoed similar sentiments in an older article. Google itself warns that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking.However, if the only way that you know to increase organic traffic is to increase rankings, you will find yourself facing clear limitations.Even if we shift the focus from rankings to more tangible metrics like organic traffic and revenue, there are still several reasons why SEO experts don’t offer guarantees:

SEO requires work on the client side. If all of the SEO recommendations are not completed, or if they aren’t correctly executed, results can be impacted through no fault of the SEO firm.

Unrelated website changes can negatively affect SEO. If the client is making other changes to the website at the same time as SEO changes are being made, they may impact organic traffic and/or revenue.

Linking results to a particular campaign or tactic is nearly impossible. SEO changes take time to implement and are often rolled out gradually. It also takes time for search engines to pick up changes. These delays can be several months in total, so even with good results, it’s difficult to link the effect to its cause.

And perhaps most importantly…

Search engine algorithms are a moving target. Google is continuously tweaking its algorithms to ensure it can deliver the most relevant content to its users. In the past, major algorithm changes have suddenly altered the SEO landscape. SEO experts are highly aware that what works today might not work in a few months.

Why we want to offer a guarantee anyway

Reputable SEO experts avoid guarantees for good reason. From their perspective, it’s the ethical thing to do.Unfortunately, some who offer SEO services are unethical. They know that it commonly takes six months to see SEO results. Clients expect to pay for SEO services for several months before they see the payoff. These unethical SEOs can use tactics that are ultimately ineffective or even harmful, but they will have gotten their paycheck anyway. They take advantage of the fact that no one expects a guarantee in SEO. At a small company, six months of effort with no results can have a big impact. That budget could have been allocated to another channel that would have been more effective. It could even cost someone their job. That is part of why we offer a guarantee: to allay client fears about SEO.However, the guarantee serves a greater purpose than that. Our guarantee is offered to clients who choose our revenue-share pricing option. This means that the more successful our clients are, the more successful we are.

Thus, our company culture is centered on results, not activity.

By focusing on results, we align our culture and processes with client expectations. Clients focus on ROI; so do we. In B2B, ROI-focused companies stand the test of time. By combining a guarantee with revenue sharing, we create win-wins with our clients.

How we’re able to offer a guarantee

Of course, many SEO experts would probably like to offer guarantees, but they don’t for all the reasons mentioned earlier. So how is it possible for us to guarantee results?There are five reasons we are able to offer a guarantee when other SEO firms cannot:

We take a reliable approach to SEO

We implement SEO changes directly

We automate tedious work

We track every change

We choose who to work with

We take a reliable approach to SEO

In traditional SEO, the focus is on building a website’s reputation. In many ways, it’s akin to brand marketing — you aim to raise awareness of your site and credibility in search engines’ eyes by creating high-quality, shareable content. If you are in publishing, this approach has strong advantages. It gets more visitors to your site, which is what you need to be successful.However, if you are in ecommerce, you need more than visitors — you need visitors that are qualified and motivated to buy. Your goal is for visitors to complete some action on your site, usually a transaction. For ecommerce, we manage SEO as a direct response channel, instead of as a brand marketing channel. We have been able to reliably drive results with this approach.To understand how we manage SEO as a direct response channel, let me take you back in time to 2012. Google Shopping (then known as Google Product Search) was free. Back then, marketers didn’t pay much attention to their product listings. It didn’t cost anything to list products, but optimizing product listings took a lot of time. Often, minimal effort was invested.

Today, etailers pay for every click, so they hire agencies or a dedicated employee to manage their PLAs. Our approach to SEO is to manage it as if it were a paid search channel. We want to maximize the value of every click. It does take a lot of work to do manually, but we’ve streamlined that effort (more on this in a minute).Recall the concern that search engine algorithms are a moving target? The best practices for Direct Response SEO don’t change much, so we don’t have to worry about new algorithms destroying our work.

We implement SEO changes directly

I’ll let you in on a secret: There is a significant hurdle in SEO that isn’t talked about much.Want to know what it is?Actually getting all of the recommendations implemented. Sometimes the clients’ developers are inundated with other tasks. Sometimes there’s a large amount of tedious work that falls by the wayside. And sometimes, the ecommerce platform will not even allow you to make the recommended changes.Our SEO platform allows us to implement all of our recommendations, on any platform. Busy developers? They don’t need to lift a finger after installing our platform. Tedious tasks? They’ll all be automated. Platform issues? We will totally circumvent it.How our platform is able to do all of this? That is a bigger topic than I can cover here, but you can read more about how it works.Most SEO experts aren’t able to ensure that their clients implement the recommendations completely and without error, so it’s risky to offer a guarantee. Even if they are confident in their recommendations, the recommendations may not get executed.

We automate tedious work

Much of foundational SEO work is time-consuming. And tedious. And technical. These qualities make it less-than-fun for humans, but perfect for computers.We use automation and artificial intelligence to execute SEO recommendations en masse across your site.I could go on at length about how exciting it is to be able to automate the boring stuff, but the point is this – automation helps us offer a guarantee.Because the bulk of the work is automated, we don’t have the same investment of man-hours into our SEO work as most agencies doing manual work. If a client wasn’t seeing results and needed to exercise their right to a guarantee, the SEO agency will have already spent a considerable amount on wages for their staff to create content, market it, and so on. We don’t have the same cost structure as agencies who do SEO manually.

We track every change

When the SEO process takes months, and involves a lot of different changes happening at the same time, it’s difficult to link success (or failure) to the exact cause. Automation enables us to implement changes quickly, which is great. But it also allows us to track every change to the website and the impact it has on traffic. When you:

Speed up the SEO process,

Follow foundational SEO best practices, and

Track the results for each type of SEO change,

It becomes pretty clear what changes led to an increase in traffic. In our app, we are able to track what effect a given change had.When SEO recommendations are applied to the site, we track the effect the recommendations have on traffic, click-through rate and revenue. If you’re interested in how our platform works, we have more details here.This takes care of two of the objections to SEO guarantees:

We are able to see which changes have an effect on organic traffic within a few weeks of implementation, linking cause and effect; and

We can track the effect of SEO changes.

We choose who to work with

We are selective about who we work with because we want to create win-win situations with our clients. We’ve learned quite a bit about how to predict who will be a good fit for us, and who won’t. To assess fit, we first scan the prospective client’s site for high-impact foundational SEO issues.Then we do a business case with the client to see if a relationship would be profitable for both the client and ourselves.If the client has big SEO problems that our software can solve, then we can be confident that we can deliver results. If not, then we aren’t a good fit for them, and we shouldn’t be taking their money anyway.Since we measure performance, we are able to improve our ability to judge who will be a good fit for us. We may not succeed 100% of the time, but we learn from our mistakes and become more selective.

Who we are a good fit for

When we offer our guarantee, we are also entering into a partnership. We’re agreeing to be paid on revenue sharing, so we’re invested in the outcome. For that reason, we partner with companies that have a clearly differentiated value proposition and a solid reputation. These companies deserve to rank highly. Companies with a lean digital marketing team tend to be a good fit. There is often one person who is responsible for multiple marketing channels. The digital marketer has limited time and resources to devote to SEO, but ambitious growth goals. We’re able to offload time-consuming tasks onto the software, and provide our SEO expertise to guide their efforts.We’re also a good fit for an in-house SEO manager who is responsible for multiple brand websites or a very large site. For these clients, we provide a scalable, low-maintenance solution for tedious work so that the in-house person can focus on the elements of SEO that need a human touch.

Our guarantee

We offer a guaranteed increase in organic revenue to qualified clients. Select agency partners are able to make the same guarantee. Here is how the guarantee works:We allow a period of three months for your site to be optimized and for those changes to be picked up by search engines. Beginning in the fourth month, for a total of 12 consecutive months, we guarantee an increase in YOY organic traffic of 15% or more. If we fall short of that goal, we will issue credits that can be spent on consulting hours or software subscription fees. We calculate the amount of credits on a quarterly basis as a percentage of the fees that you paid for that quarter. For example, if you only see an improvement in organic revenue of 7.5% in months 4-6, we will issue credits equal to 50% of the fees you paid for those three months. If we are up to a 10% improvement in months 7-10, we will issue credits equal to 33% of that quarter’s fees.Our guarantee is a reflection of our commitment to your success. If we fall short of our goal, we will continue working until we reach it, and surpass it.Some potential clients may have been burned by SEO vendors in the past, and might have concerns about negative repercussions of using our service. So, we further guarantee that if your site is penalized by search engines, or your traffic is negatively impacted by work that we did, we will refund 100% of your fees. We will also give you a year of free consulting until we reverse the problem and raise your traffic above where it was before we started working with you.We make these guarantees so that our clients know we will be a trusted partner. We’re able to offer them for all the reasons listed above, but also because in all my years of getting great SEO results for clients, I haven’t seen the need to cut any corners.
I jokingly tell prospects, “I’ve only been doing SEO for 16 years.” I know from experience what SEO issues present a good opportunity to create ROI. And of course, that experience is built into our processes, our team, and our software to make sure we can deliver.

Key takeaways

Even though most reputable SEOs do not offer guarantees, our unique approach to SEO allows us and our agency partners to guarantee results.

Through automation, we can consistently apply foundational SEO best practices across our clients’ sites and track the outcome of every change.

We are selective about who we work with to ensure we can deliver a great ROI for every client we accept.

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/our-seo-guarantee/feed/0https://www.ranksense.com/our-seo-guarantee/SEO Tactic #6: Optimize Media for Search Engineshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HamletBatista--InternetEntrepreneurDeveloperAndSearchMarketer/~3/-ae4NZCuWsE/
https://www.ranksense.com/seo-tactic-6-optimize-media-search-engines/#respondWed, 06 Sep 2017 09:00:52 +0000https://www.ranksense.com/?p=5459In this tactic, we’ll be optimizing your images, videos, and PDFs for search engines. This will help your multimedia content perform better in image and video searches, which have less competition than general web searches. I’ll go over the best practices for multimedia SEO.

This is part 6 of a 15-part series on ecommerce SEO. In previous tip, I explained how to optimize your store navigation with keyword research.In this tactic, we’ll be optimizing your images, videos, and PDFs for search engines. This will help your multimedia content perform better in image and video searches, which have less competition than general web searches. Setting up your PDFs correctly will not only help them rank higher, but will also help you track traffic coming to the PDFs (and retarget those visitors later on). Performing well in these areas can help generate extra traffic to your site. I’ll go over the best practices for multimedia SEO.

Tip #1: When in doubt, add kittens. Everyone loves kittens. (Just kidding.)Photo by dougwoods, used under CC BY

The goal of this tactic

Our goal is to optimize images, video and PDFs for search engines. This will help search engines find your media content and display it in search results.

Overview

To optimize your media, we’ll make sure your sitemaps include images and videos. We’ll also add the appropriate meta tags and structured data.This tactic will help your media perform better in search results to drive more traffic to your site.

How to use this tactic

Step 1 – Check analytics

First, we’ll check how many organic clicks are coming from images and video.Go to Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Search Analytics. Under Search Type, choose Filter by search type, then choose Image. Note the number of clicks. Repeat for Video.You may also want to perform a site: search on Google in both images and videos. Search for site:yoursitename.com, then click the Images tab. This will give you an idea of what images are indexed on your site. To search for videos, click the More tab and select Videos.

Step 2 – Optimize images

There are a few steps to take to optimize your images.

Create an image sitemap, or include images in your regular sitemap. This will help search engines to find your images and get information about them while crawling your site. You can optionally include tags with the title or caption of the images (see Search Console Help’s image sitemap article for more optional image tags). Here’s an example of an image sitemap (if you include them in your regular XML sitemap, make sure to include the corresponding namespace):

Include descriptive alt text. Alt text helps search engines understand what is in the image. In general, your alt text should be brief and contain the keywords that you want that you want the image to rank for. For product images, the product name is perfect. For category images, use the category name or describe the category briefly.

Use descriptive filenames. For all new images that are added to the site, the filename should match the product name. However, please note that renaming all of the images on your site will cause search engines to take time to crawl, process and re-index the new image files.

If you do a site migration where your image URLs change (HTTPS migration, domain change, and some CMS migrations), remember to map the image names using 301 redirects from the old image URLs to the new image URLs. This is commonly missed during migrations, causing images to be dropped from the index until they are eventually re-crawled. Search engines crawl and index images more slowly than webpages, so they may be dropped for some time.

Step 3 – Optimize videos

Not every ecommerce site has videos, but if you do, you’ll want to make sure that they can be found by search engines.

Create a video sitemap, or include videos in your regular sitemap. This will help search engines understand your video content and feature them in results like Google Video searches. Here’s an example of a video sitemap:

These tags are required, but there are additional video tags available to give search engines more information about your video. See Google’s Video sitemaps article for more. Make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any of the URLs, like the thumbnail URL or video file URL.
It’s important to note that the video:content_loc tag tells Google that you own the actual video content and aren’t simply embedding someone else’s content. It is also a good practice to only make the actual video content visible to Googlebot to prevent third parties from copying it.

Add structured data to your videos. Pages that contain a video should contain markup for video objects. There is a long list of possible properties you can add on schema.org, but Google’s article on video markup contains a shorter list of tags that are either required or recommend. The important tags are included in this example code:

Once you’ve added structured data to your page, use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to make sure your code is being read properly.

Step 4 – Add PDF viewers

You may have PDFs that contain valuable content, such as buying guides, how-to resources, or catalogs. When visitors come directly to a PDF link, you aren’t able to track those visitors or tag them for retargeting. The horror!
It’s better for your analytics and marketing if visitors land on a PDF viewer webpage that contains the PDF rather than arrive at the PDF straightaway. With a PDF viewer like ViewerJS, you can display your PDF content, add tracking pixels to the web page and then be able to track your visitors.
However, sometimes the PDF itself will be linked from third-party websites. This is generally a good thing – yay link equity! – but it has a downside. The PDF will be competing against the webpage in the search results. The link equity is split between two sources, à la duplicate content, so both end up ranking lower than they could be if all the link equity went to one. Worse still, the PDF may end up beating the webpage in search results, driving more visitors to a place where they can’t be tracked.
There’s an easy way to pass the link equity from the PDF to the corresponding webpage – canonical tags. As I explained in the duplicate content tip, canonical tags tell a search engine which version is the “main” version, and passes the link equity from the other sources to the main one.
Typically, canonical tags are used in the HTML code of a website in the section. However, PDFs don’t have a section – they don’t even have any HTML. Fortunately, canonical tags can be added in another place – the HTTP header.
To add canonicals to the HTTP header, you will need to modify the .htaccess file (for an Apache server). For example, when you add this to the .htaccess file:

That way, search engines will understand to pass the link equity from your PDF to the corresponding webpage. Another advantage of this is that the PDF viewer page will get listed in the search results.
That’s all for this tactic! Adhering to SEO best practices for images, videos and PDFs will help drive more traffic to your site over time. Remember that images and videos are crawled and indexed more slowly than your web pages are, so it may take longer than you expect to see results from this tactic. You can re-check your stats from Step 1 to monitor your progress. Let me know how your results turn out in the comments!
And be sure to check out the previous tips in this series:

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This is part 5 of a 15-part series to help you improve your ecommerce site’s SEO. Sign up to be notified when a new tip is published!
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The goal of this tactic

Our goal is to optimize store navigation elements for search engines.

Overview

This tactic will help you align your store navigation with popular relevant keywords. We’ll research the keywords that are already bringing traffic into your category pages and look for opportunities to improve the SEO.However, be careful not to sacrifice user experience for SEO. User experience should be your first concern with your store navigation. Once your store navigation is user-friendly, you can start working on making it search engine friendly. This tactic isn’t about re-organizing your navigation structure.I like to use mind map software like Xmind (available in both free and paid versions) to visualize a store navigation, but you can also use a regular spreadsheet if you prefer.

How to use this tactic

Step 1 – Create a navigation map

First, we’ll create a map of our current store navigation in a mindmap. We’ll use Tiffany’s as an example for this exercise. Here’s a map of their desktop site navigation:You can see that I’ve created each category page as a “node” coming from the center, and all sub-categories as nodes of their parent category. Later, we’ll color-code these as we discover opportunities for optimization. It’s helpful to also create a spreadsheet because we will be entering additional data for each category page later on. A spreadsheet could look something like this:Because users behave differently on mobile than on desktop, the two need to be analyzed separately. So go ahead and create a map for your mobile site as well, if it differs from your desktop site. I’ll focus on the desktop site in most of the examples below, but be sure to analyze your mobile site as well.Next, we’ll research the top keywords that are driving traffic to your category pages.

Step 2 – Research

In this step, we’ll check to see if the names of our navigation elements align with the keywords that are driving traffic to them. One clear benefit of matching our navigational elements to popular search queries is that the words will be highlighted in the search results. This makes it clear to both search engines and users that the page is directly relevant to the search term, which can improve both rankings and CTRs.First, find the URLs for each category and sub-category page. Next, we’ll use Google Search Console to find the top keywords for each page. Go to Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Search Analytics, then select Pages in the grey box:Find the first category page in the list below or click “No filter” just below pages to filter the URLs for the category page.When you locate the category page, click the >> symbol on the right. To see the top keywords for that page, click Queries in the grey box at the top. You’ll want to exclude branded queries where users are already searching for your site, so create a filter to remove queries containing your brand name:Brand names can be misspelt, so use the shortest text that you think will cover most branded search terms. Finally, check that the queries are sorted by the number of clicks in descending order. Find the top query and list it in your spreadsheet.We’ll highlight queries that do not closely match the category page name so that you can turn your attention to them later on. However, choosing which opportunities to pursue is not an exact science. Ask yourself these questions:

Is the top keyword an exact match of the name in the navigation? Note that you need to lump together plurals, singulars and misspellings.

If it’s not an exact match, is it in the top 3? Top 5? The lower it ranks, the more opportunity there is to improve.

Are the top keywords teaching me something new and interesting?

In my sheet, I’ve highlighted mismatches in yellow and promising opportunities to improve in orange (more on this below).Let’s get some additional data for the spreadsheet. This will help us to compare the site performance before and after you make changes. In the list of queries in Search Console, click the >> beside the top query. Check the boxes for impressions, CTR and position, and add columns for each to your spreadsheet. Fill in that data.In our example of Tiffany’s, we do not have access to Search Console because we are not affiliated with them, so I’ve used a third-party keyword tool to find this information.Here are some examples from Tiffany’s where the navigational name is not a close match with the top queries for the page:
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[av_row row_style=”][av_cell col_style=”]The Journey of a Diamond[/av_cell][av_cell col_style=”]Ethically Sourced Diamonds[/av_cell][/av_row]
[av_row row_style=”][av_cell col_style=”]The Tiffany Concierge[/av_cell][av_cell col_style=”]Tiffany Ring Cleaning[/av_cell][/av_row]
[av_row row_style=”][av_cell col_style=”]Jewelry Under 1500[/av_cell][av_cell col_style=”]Engagement Rings Under 2000[/av_cell][/av_row]
[av_row row_style=”][av_cell col_style=”]Wedding Bands[/av_cell][av_cell col_style=”]Wedding Rings[/av_cell][/av_row]
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The top queries reveal what search visitors actually care about when they happen upon your site:

Ethically sourced diamonds – Visitors care whether their diamonds are ethically sourced, so this may be an opportunity to better target those visitors with existing content.

Tiffany ring cleaning – The content on the Tiffany Concierge page does not closely match this query, but it does detail other services they offer. This reveals an opportunity to tweak the page content to take advantage of traffic that page is already receiving.

Engagement rings under 2000 – Even though these visitors are looking for engagement rings, they are being taken to a jewelry category page – which excludes engagement rings on Tiffany’s site. However, Tiffany’s does not offer engagement rings in this price bracket, so they may not be a good match for these visitors.

Wedding rings – It’s more common for visitors to search for “wedding rings” than “wedding bands,” so this would be an easy change.

So you see, this process does not always reveal a straightforward name change. You may need to tweak on-page content, or just not worry about visitors who are searching for something that you don’t offer. You also need to take branding considerations into account when contemplating name changes. Here’s our mind map with the pages that could be changed highlighted:The Xmind software will allow you to add information onto any page, so you can enter your keyword research data directly into the mindmap if you prefer. This will provide the data that backs up your recommended navigational changes.Remember to repeat this process for the mobile version of your site.

Step 3 – Make changes and analyze data

Identify changes that you want to test. For example, if we were Tiffany’s, we might change “The Journey of a Tiffany Diamond” to “Tiffany’s Ethically-Sourced Diamonds.” We recommend making one change at a time and monitoring for at least one month. Depending on how quickly search engines pick up changes to your site, you may need to wait two months to actually see the effects of the change. After a month or two, you can compare the impressions, CTR and rankings for each page by following the same steps as you did in Step 2. If your industry is subject to seasonal fluctuations, your impressions may fluctuate, so CTR and rankings are the most reliable KPIs. Also monitor the aggregate organic search traffic to the site before and after each change.Analyze the mobile site similarly.That’s all for this tip! I hope it helps you uncover some opportunities to align your store navigation with keywords that are popular and relevant. Did you find this tactic helpful? Check out the previous posts in this series:

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/make-your-store-navigation-search-engine-friendly/feed/0https://www.ranksense.com/make-your-store-navigation-search-engine-friendly/How We Reverted a Frustrating Negative SEO Downtrend in Six Weekshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HamletBatista--InternetEntrepreneurDeveloperAndSearchMarketer/~3/DQGAEJfq_44/
https://www.ranksense.com/reverted-frustrating-negative-seo-downtrend-six-weeks/#respondWed, 26 Jul 2017 18:49:49 +0000https://www.ranksense.com/?p=5381What do you do when you’re losing organic traffic and you don’t know why? An SEO audit from an expert like Hamlet can help, but how do you know which changes are worth your time and resources?
In this post, I’ll walk you through a case study of an ecommerce site that went from a -12.8% traffic downtrend to growth in two months.

What do you do when you’re losing organic traffic and you don’t know why? An SEO audit from an expert like Hamlet can help, but they often come with so many recommendations that it’s difficult to execute everything. How do you know which changes are worth your time and resources?In this post, I’ll walk you through a case study of an ecommerce site that went from a traffic downtrend to growth in a couple of months. Their traffic was at -12.8% YOY for 2016. After the first month, the traffic was at -7.3%. By the second month, it was up by +21.8%, and it’s now at +21.9% and holding. Their downtrend was reversed within six weeks of implementation:I’ll explain how we were able to quickly reverse their traffic downtrend. Rather than the typical approach of tweaking content, optimizing keywords and building links, we focus on SEO issues that are often overlooked – site infrastructure, coding and tagging. I’ll show how our unique approach speeds up the process of SEO and allows us to measure the benefit of all the changes we make.When we first met Chris Graham of MoreBeer.com at a trade show, his site was losing traffic to newer competitors who ranked higher in search results. These competitors charged more for lower quality home brewing equipment, so he knew price and quality weren’t the problem. The problem was SEO.

Chris sought the help of SEO experts to improve his traffic. However, his developers had difficulty executing all the SEO recommendations alongside the other projects on their plate. It was difficult to know which changes to prioritize, and they weren’t seeing the results they needed.

Our automated solution

Manual SEO primarily focuses on content, keywords and links. In our experience, most well-managed ecommerce sites are doing a fine job on content and keyword optimization, but are neglecting other important aspects of SEO. (This is due, in part, to the fact that technical resources are generally scarce.) Our approach to SEO is to build a solid foundation of good site infrastructure and coding. We call this the Foundational SEO Method.Foundational SEO ensures that your pages can be found in search engine results in the first place. Rather than starting with keywords and content, this approach focuses on crawlability, indexation and tagging issues, among others. The goal is to get more pages ranking and receiving organic search traffic, not just higher rankings for pages that already rank.

One benefit of the Foundational SEO Method is that it can be automated by software. Our platform can apply SEO changes to thousands of pages instantaneously. We can also track the effect that different changes have over time, so that we know what changes actually helped. Because our platform has artificial intelligence built in, it learns what changes have the most impact and improves its recommendations over time – even if Google’s algorithm changes. We see that by addressing infrastructure, coding and tagging issues, we can consistently deliver traffic increases of at least 15%, because almost all ecommerce sites suffer from these problems.
Before I dive into the results that MoreBeer saw, a quick note on terminology. At RankSense, we only consider a page optimized if it ranks and drives traffic. We don’t look at a ranking factor checklist and call a page “optimized” – we only look at results. So when I say a page “became optimized,” it means a page started receiving traffic where it wasn’t receiving any before.

Which recommendations made the difference for MoreBeer?

We have a standard set of technical issues that we check for every client, and then we customize our research per site based on the findings from the free scan. Almost every page on MoreBeer.com had at least one issue to fix. To figure out which factors had the most impact, we grouped pages by the types of changes that we made, and monitored the number of new users coming from the organic search channel:

We grouped pages by what SEO changes were made and tracked the number of new users.

Our software was implemented on January 4, so you can see the traffic before we made changes and after the changes were picked up by search engines. For any line that stays at more-or-less the same level before and after, that means those changes didn’t have much of an effect on the number of new users. (This is somewhat of an oversimplification that ignores factors like seasonal variability.) The biggest uptick is in the green line around February 11. This was a group of over 1200 pages that had updates to the canonical tag, meta description, and title tag. For reference, compare it to the blue line – we changed the canonical tags and title tags on this group of 2,000+ pages – and they didn’t see the same impact.Although our software was implemented on January 4, we didn’t roll out all of the changes immediately. Most changes were made on January 10, but several hundred were made on January 30, and we continued making changes as late as April.

Meta description improvements

Back to the blue and green groups – was the difference in performance coming from the meta description updates? At first glance, that appears to be the main difference between those two groups.To delve further into this question, we looked at the optimized pages. (Remember our definition of an optimized page?) We separated both groups into pages that were already optimized (already receiving traffic before we made any changes) and pages that had just become optimized (were not receiving traffic before but are now).

Pages that were already optimized (receiving traffic) versus pages that became optimized after our changes.

For the blue group (which had changes made to the canonical and title tags), pages that were already performing continued to receive traffic, but very few pages were optimized by the changes. On the other hand, in the green group, several hundred pages became optimized. This is the power of the Foundational SEO Method – pages that weren’t receiving any traffic started to drive traffic.I’ll take a second to mention that our software is able to write meta descriptions by summarizing content from the page. We use natural language processing (similar to the technology that powers Siri) to pull snippets from the page’s existing content and write meta descriptions automatically. This surprises some people, but our machine-written snippets have been found to out-perform manually written meta descriptions in A/B testing experiments. So, when we have a client who is missing meta descriptions, we can easily generate them without having to spend time and resources writing them.We found that 706 pages on MoreBeer were missing meta descriptions, so we had the software write those and add them to the pages. We also made updates to the existing meta descriptions of 685 pages. Pages that had been completely missing meta descriptions saw a traffic gain:

Pages that had no meta description before our changes (empty) compared to pages that had updates to an existing meta description (non-empty). Note: Pages that were receiving 301 redirects were removed from this plot – more on this later.

We can break the green group down further. We found that 70% of the pages in the green group were related to brewing techniques – important content marketing in the homebrew business. It turned out that the brewing technique pages had more new users than the other 30% of pages:

The pages in the green group were separated into brewing technique pages and all others. The pages were grouped by how many new users they had (x-axis), then the number of pages were counted (y-axis).

This chart shows that the brewing technique pages had more new users than the other pages in the green group. The brewing technique pages had no meta descriptions prior to this, so this data suggests that adding meta descriptions to important content marketing pieces helped these pages rank higher and drive traffic. However, when we looked closer, the meta descriptions weren’t the only factor that helped these pages rank.

Reclaiming link equity

Some of the pages in the green group (16%) were receiving more link equity because we repaired broken backlinks on the site. For every client, we look for broken backlinks: pages that no longer exist but that some external source links to. Whenever possible, we redirect the dead URLs to a relevant live page on the site. This passes the link equity along to the live page, boosting its reputation in the eyes of search engines. We found that the pages that were receiving 301 redirects were more likely to have an increase in traffic.Let’s revisit the graph from above, separating out all the pages that were receiving redirects (red line):

As in the above graph, the number of new users were tracked over time for different SEO changes, but pages receiving new 301 redirects were separated from all groups (red).

We can see now that the uptick in the green line is a bit more modest, and that a significant portion of overall growth in traffic can be attributed to 301 redirects that were added for 412 dead URLs. (Note that pages receiving 301 redirects were separated from all the groups and combined in the red line.)Broken backlinks are common on ecommerce sites. Links are built over time, but pages get moved and that valuable link equity gets lost. Again, we take advantage of automation to simplify the process of mapping broken backlinks to live pages on the site.

Mapping broken links to live pages with software

For each 404 URL, our software looks for a matching page on the live site so that it can redirect the dead link to a live link. The software uses multiple algorithms which compete against each other. This may sound a little technical, but it just means that we take different approaches to try to find a match, then we choose the best one – all automatically. The matches are scored by the software, and the highest scoring one “wins” and will be redirected to. A member of our team checks the matches to see how closely the 404 URL matches the live page and scores them (i.e. perfect match, close match, etc.).For sites with a lot of broken backlinks, this gives us the results of a link building campaign with a fraction of the time and effort.

Conclusion

Both of the issues that had the most impact for MoreBeer – missing meta descriptions and broken backlinks – are tedious to fix manually. Writing thousands of meta descriptions takes serious time and effort, as does finding a good match for each 404 URL. If you aren’t certain that there will be any benefit, it probably doesn’t seem worth the effort. In any business, there are a myriad of other issues to devote your time to where the benefit is more certain (and where the work isn’t so boring!).Our automated approach simplified the task of validating those changes. When we begin working with a new client, we have a good idea of what changes will be the most effective, but our software is able to verify that our educated guesses are correct. SEO is usually somewhat of an art, but our approach makes it more of a science, breaking it down into a methodical process of testing hypotheses, making observations and drawing conclusions. Foundational SEO isn’t able to replace content efforts, but it compliments them, maximizing the value that you get out of your content. The SEO fixes that will have the biggest impact vary from site to site. We knew that MoreBeer had opportunity to reverse their downtrend because their free scan showed that they had a good number of foundational SEO issues to fix. For other clients, the biggest issues might be duplicate content or poor crawlability. By taking a methodical approach to foundational SEO issues, we’re able to identify a variety of problems and validate our fixes.

Key takeaways

While producing high quality content is essential, ignoring tedious foundational SEO work can cost you dearly. We took MoreBeer from a -12.8% YOY traffic downtrend to +21.9% YOY and holding by addressing SEO tagging issues.

Measuring the outcome of various SEO fixes gave us the confidence that we caused the improvements, and provided insights into which changes were the most effective so we can continually improve our SEO process.

The changes that made the biggest difference for MoreBeer were implementing 301 redirects for broken backlinks and adding meta descriptions to pages that didn’t have them. This is, understandably, the kind of mind-numbing work that no marketer or business owner wants to do, but that our platform will gladly do with no complaints.

MoreBeer’s growth has been holding at +20-22% YOY for four months at the time of this writing. Here’s Chris to tell you how it turned out:

]]>https://www.ranksense.com/reverted-frustrating-negative-seo-downtrend-six-weeks/feed/0https://www.ranksense.com/reverted-frustrating-negative-seo-downtrend-six-weeks/How Our Free SEO Scan Workshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HamletBatista--InternetEntrepreneurDeveloperAndSearchMarketer/~3/I1MvHBgxJq4/
https://www.ranksense.com/free-seo-scan-works/#respondMon, 19 Jun 2017 09:13:29 +0000https://www.ranksense.com/?p=5301Wondering what SEO issues your site has, and how much they're costing you? We offer a free SEO scan that can help answer those questions. We’ll scan your site for issues that have a negative impact on SEO. We’ll check up to 10,000 pages from your site and automatically send you a complete report explaining what issues were found and how to fix them.

Wondering what SEO issues your site has, and how much they’re costing you? We offer a free SEO scan that can help answer those questions. We’ll scan your site for issues that have a negative impact on SEO. We’ll check up to 10,000 pages from your site and automatically send you a complete report explaining what issues were found and how to fix them.

SEO report overview

Discover SEO issues

Your scan will check up to 10,000 pages for 14 common issues that have a negative impact on SEO. Your report will contain a full list of URLs that have each problem. Here’s a few of the issues we check for:

Learn how to fix problems

Your report will explain each issue, what causes it, and how to fix it. We rely on expert knowledge and advice directly from Google to create our recommendations. We’ve created a video to explain how to use your report. It explains all the features and shows examples.
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Assess impact of SEO issues on revenue

These SEO issues have a hidden cost. They lower your organic traffic, and in turn, your revenue. Our SEO scan includes a calculator to help you estimate how much revenue your SEO issues cost you each month. We’ve seen many sites increase their revenue by 15-30% or more by fixing these problems. The following video explains how to use the revenue calculator. You might be surprised at how much SEO issues are costing you.
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We offer a free review of your report with an SEO expert to those who qualify. When you request your scan, just say “yes” to the complimentary 30-minute review and we’ll get in touch with you.
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Right on the heels of Pioneers in Vienna, we attended IRCE in Chicago! The Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition is a world-class ecommerce conference and trade show, featuring expert speakers and workshops alongside an array of ecommerce exhibitors.

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One thing that we learned from IRCE was how important it is to start a conversation with attendees, rather than just try to scan their badge to get their email address. As we walked the expo floor, we saw many companies taking the latter tactic, but our goal was deeper than just building an email list of people who may or may not want to hear from us. By engaging an attendee in a conversation, we could learn their SEO goals and see if we would be a good fit for their needs. Only then would we worry about getting their email address. Of course, we were also offering value by running a free SEO scan of their site.
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We just got back from two back-to-back events, each with a very different focus! The first was the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, Austria – where startup innovators can schmooze with investors, executives, and the media. Out of 1600 startups that applied, RankSense was among the 500 selected to attend. On five live stages, Pioneers featured expert talks, panel discussions, hands-on workshops, and pitch sessions with judges from venture capital firms.The conference was filled with cutting-edge technology, so there were plenty of robots, artificial intelligence applications, and virtual reality systems to see. Amongst such a backdrop, the people we met were very interested to learn about RankSense’s automation and artificial intelligence. The applications of AI are expanding rapidly, and we’re enjoying being part of that expansion.
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